Dauntless Survivor

The whole card is that counter: a 1/1 body priced two mana, whose entire justification is landing a permanent +1/+1 on something already worth building around. Green has always paid for creature bodies by the pound, so a vanilla 1/1 for two would be a non-card; the trigger is what earns the slot. The design choice worth noting is that the counter goes on target creature, not on itself, so the survivor is content to buff a first-striker, a lord, or a creature carrying an aura, then chump-block on the way out. That flexibility comes at a real cost: the body is fragile, the counter is a one-time effect that leaves nothing behind once the creature dies, and against a wide-open board the survivor often just adds one point to a race it was never winning. It sits in the long line of green creatures that fold a small growth stimulus into a warm body, useful when the counter matters more than the flesh delivering it and forgettable when it does not.